A tasty and refreshing guilt free summer treat: Boozy peach lime Italian ice with tipsy cherries is made with all natural ingredients, gluten-free, vegan and refined sugar free and is the perfect dessert to cool down in the summer. Just a handful of ingredients needed.

So this recipe started out as a sober PG rated smoothie, and then things took a turn. I was just renting an apartment in Portimão, Portugal (or should I say beach paradise) for 4 days and as luck would it, in the kitchen I stumbled upon an immersion blender with a mini food processor attachment.

Bingo!

If you always get to cook in the comforts of your own fully equipped kitchen you couldn’t possibly understand what I’m dealing with when I travel for 6 months straight jumping from one poorly equipped kitchen to the next. So when I see an immersion blender with a mini food prep attachment I think smoothie.

A blender would be too much to ask for you see. So I thought I would surprise D with a delightful refreshing smooth summer smoothie. First thought: piña colada smoothie, but I’ve done that before – time for something new.

Well, it turns out a mini food prep attachment doesn’t quite have to ability to make things as smooth as your good old blender. Erh, time to shift gears. A smoothie needs to be super smooth, but what doesn’t?….. Italian ICE!

In D’s terms I also over did it on the lime, it was just too sour and limey for him. Well, time to turn this into something for me then.

So it should be no surprise that first thing I did was throw in a cup of wine into the mix. Why not? Summer and wine complement eachother nicely so time to share that wine happiness with other food categories.

Instead of a smoothie a new Italian ice recipe was born. Italian ice, or water ice, shaved ice, however you call it. For a proper understanding of Italian ice, Wikipedia does a find job in their description: “Italian ice, also known as water ice is a sweetened frozen dessert made with fruit. Italian ice is not shaved ice that is flavored; rather, it is made by the same process by which ice cream is made: freezing the ingredients while mixing them. Italian ice is similar to sorbet but differs from American-style sherbet in that it does not contain dairy or egg ingredients, though it may contain egg white”

A bit of a tricky description, so I’ll just shorten that and say it’s cold, it’s refreshing, it’s perfect for summer. And you might get a light buzz off of it.

Vegan, gluten-free and refined sugar free too.

Sweet + lightly sour with a bit of creamy and alcoholic kick. We’re talking pureed peaches, lime juice + zest, a bit of coconut cream, water and red wine. Blend together and pop into a freeze safe container. Check on it every few hours and once it starts to solidify, start scraping it with a spoon.

Scrape a bit, place back in the freeze and repeat a couple more time at hour increments. Or just start eating it directly from the container.

While that’s freezing get your drunk cherries ready. With your handy cherry pitter, which you might have in that well stocked kitchen, and which I definitely do not carry with me in my 30 liter backpack, start removing those pits. Or get your knife skills ready. As a last and laziest resort, just bite directly into the cherries and remove the pit – though this might be best reserved for occasions where you won’t be serving this to your dinner guests.

Char those red cherry bits in a hot pan on high heat until you can almost hear then sizzling,then add a bit of red wine and let it reduce. Pop in the freeze to chill.

Assemble the Italian ice in a tall glass topped with drunken cherries and a bit of lime zest.

So this recipe started out as a sober PG rated smoothie, and then things took a turn. I was just renting an apartment in Portimão, Portugal (or should I say beach paradise) for 4 days and as luck would it, in the kitchen I stumbled upon an immersion blender with a mini food processor attachment.

Well, it turns out a mini food prep attachment doesn’t quite have to ability to make things as smooth as your good old blender. Erh, time to shift gears. A smoothie needs to be super smooth, but what doesn’t?….. Italian ICE!

A bit of a tricky description, so I’ll just shorten that and say it’s cold, it’s refreshing, it’s perfect for summer. And you might get a light buzz off of it.

Vegan, gluten-free and refined sugar free too.

Scrape a bit, place back in the freeze and repeat a couple more time at hour increments. Or just start eating it directly from the container.

Char those red cherry bits in a hot pan on high heat until you can almost hear then sizzling,then add a bit of red wine and let it reduce. Pop in the freeze to chill.